How four avid bloggers from Chennai made fortune by blogging
For most people, blogging serves as a good pastime, a forum
to air or read views and opinions. However, for four yuppies from Chennai,
harnessing the power of blogs has proved to be a money-minting venture million
dollar business, to be precise.
Launched in August 2007, IndiBlogger.in started as a free
blogging platform for Indians. However, the founders—Renie Ravin, Karthik DR,
Vineet Rajan and Anoop Johnson—had a bigger game plan: to mobilize the
blogosphere, a nascent field at the time, so that companies and brands could
engage with their customers. The idea was conceptualized by the founders
(barring Rajan), all in their 20s, at a party in early August 2007. Convinced
that they were on to a good thing, the trio quit their respective jobs shortly
afterwards and focused on their start-up. Rajan left his account manager's job
with Hewlett Packard, Hyderabad, to join IndiBlogger after a bloggers' meet in
Pune, in March 2008.
Luckily for the founders, they found an angel investor who
chipped in with the seed capital. The money was spent on building
infrastructure and marketing.
Here's how IndiBlogger works: Registering one's blog is free
of charge, but members must publish at least five blog posts to continue to be
a part of the community. The company's eight-strong team handles support and
moderation from Chennai and Bangalore. The revenue comes from connecting brands
and bloggers via unique blogging contests and meets, which are organized periodically
across the country. The idea stems from the fact that brands see value in
connecting with bloggers, who can influence the purchase decisions of their
peer groups. In fact, a Neilsen report, Global Trust in Advertising Survey
2011, shows that less than a third of Netizens trust advertisements, while 92%
have faith in peer and word-of-mouth recommendations.
A major new programme to support
fledgling technology start-ups in the UK is to be launched in the 2013.
Cloud hosting firm Rackspace is to offer £12,000 of hosting and mentoring for
start-ups on the programme. The launch comes as the government continued efforts to encourage successful
UK start-ups to float on the stock exchange. A survey of more than 50,000 entrepreneurs ranked London as the seventh best
city to launch a start-up. The
report, by telecoms firm Telefonica, concluded that the UK's offering was
"no Silicon Valley" - due mainly to a lack of investment and what is perceived
as a risk-averse investment culture. But Rackspace, whose start-up programme has aided more than 850 US start-ups
in their early stages, said they felt the timing was right to launch its push in
the UK. Speaking at Google's Campus building in east London, technology blogger and
Rackspace "evangelist" Robert Scoble drew parallels between London today and the
early days of California's famous Silicon Valley. "If you go downstairs [at Google Campus] you can see dozens of start-ups
working at tiny little tables," he told the BBC. "This feels a lot about how I saw Instagram for the first time - two guys
sitting at a table coding like mad, two years later they're worth a billion
dollars. It has that feel to it." Rackspace is one of the world's largest cloud hosting firms - second only to
Amazon. The cloud, as it is known, is a term given to storing data on servers in a
variety of locations - rather than on a local machine. Cloud hosting gives small companies flexibility when starting out. Rather
than pay for the rental of dedicated servers, which can be expensive, it means
start-ups can just pay for what they need. 'Next
Facebook'In September, the government announced plans to loosen regulations
surrounding companies that wanted to float on the stock market. The move, which was backed by several of the country's largest investment
firms, would provide a "new route" to an initial public offering (IPO),
universities minister David Willetts said. A successful British IPO would be seen as a major success for the
government's Tech City initiative - an organisation designed to promote the
interests of UK-based start-ups globally. Companies tipped to be likely IPO candidates in the new year include Mind
Candy - creators of children's social network Moshi Monsters - and online loans
company Wonga. Mr Scoble said the key to a successful flotation was in the timing - and that
chasing the "next Facebook" may not be the right move. "Some of it is luck," he told the BBC. "Some of it is about being at the right market window at the right time.
Right now it's a really tough market window. "In Silicon Valley the venture capitalists are telling me they're moving
investment away from consumer and into enterprise because they're seeing that
the consumer markets are too risky. "They're investing less in consumer kinds of things - they're trying to get
the kids to focus on the enterprise market."
Virgin Airlines, Expedia, Jet
Airways and MakeMyTrip are taking the help of Bangalore-based startup Vizury to
analyse massive volumes of digital data on the web and target potential
customers.
The four year-old firm is expecting
to clock revenue of $ 10 million to $ 12million this year. However, it has not been an easy
journey for the founders—Chetan Kulkarni, Gourav Chindlur and Vikram Nayak—who
once worked at US-based Trilogy Software.
It was while chatting over lunch at
Trilogy that they decided to quit their jobs and set up Vizury in 2008. They
pooled in their savings of $ 2000 and converting Chindlur's bedroom into their
office. They ran out of funds after 17 venture capital firms rejected their
proposal to develop customer behavior analytics products.
"My wife was expecting and
Vikram had to pay a huge lease for the apartment he had bought," says
Kulkarni. They almost decided to shut down operations. That is when eight
friends and angels came to their rescue, with crowd-sourced funding of $150,000
(Rs 80 lakh now) in 2009, which was used to develop a customer analytics
product.
At $100
billion-plus, India's IT-BPO industry is large. However, largely focused on the
low-end services delivery, it neither has the heft nor the glamour that Silicon
Valley in the US enjoys. That may be changing slowly.
A just-released report by IT consultancy firm
Zinnov reveals that IT product start-ups in India have been growing steadily
over the years. Since 1990, it is estimated that more than 3,400 product
start-ups were seeded in India. Between now and 2015, Zinnov expects about
1,000 new start-ups to join in.
On many counts, India almost mirrors what is
happening in Silicon Valley. A large percentage of founders of start-ups in the
US are from pedigreed top-notch IT companies like Google and Apple, who quit
their jobs to turn entrepreneurs. This is happening in India too. For example,
Pratyush Prasanna, founder of Plustxt, a start-up focusing on mobile messaging,
has honed his skills at Microsoft and Xerox.
Globally, online services occupy a big focus
area for product start-ups. In India too, this is the biggest chunk, comprising
34% of start-ups. Further, globally, these start-ups are increasingly looking
at having a ubiquitous presence across platforms — from Windows to Android and
iOS. In India too this is clearly visible. In fact here, many start-ups are
also looking at Java as there is a sizeable population using Java-based phones.
Start-ups in India, like their global counterparts, are working on cloud,
looking beyond the Web.
Surprisingly, India does comparatively well on
the gender diversity front in these start-ups. In Silicon Valley, around 10% of
the start-ups have women as co-founders. In India that stands at about 6%.
There is an area where India has some catching up to do, says Kishan M Bhat,
engagement manager, Zinnov Consulting: "About 20% of the founders in
Silicon Valley are fresher’s straight out of college. In India, that figure
stands at 7%."
Here's a flavor of India's fledgling Silicon
Valley, the start-ups it is nurturing and the entrepreneurs who are making it
all happen, from Zinnov's report.
The Start-Up Boom
The Rise: The number of product start-ups
being seeded in India every year has been rising steadily. In the next three
years, about 1,000 start-ups could get seeded in India:
Where is the Boom
There are 3,402 product companies. Bangalore
and the National Capital Region remain the hub, accounting for over half of
these start-ups. While Bangalore's dominant position is understandable, it is
NCR's infrastructure that makes it such an attractive place for incubating
product start-ups. The NCR, according to the report, includes Delhi, Gurgaon,
Noida, Chandigarh and Mohali. Bangalore includes Bangalore city, Mysore,
Belgaum, Gulbarga and Hubli.
Web vs Cloud
While
almost half (47%) of the start-ups in India today are working on Web-based
platforms, there is a shift to cloud. The latter allows start-ups to get
started with very small capital and to scale up quickly.
Fund Fundamentals
Source of
Funding: Early-stage funding in India is today looking brighter than ever
before. It has gone up from $44 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion in 2011.
Best Cities to Get Funding for Your
Start-up
During 2005-12,
446 (19%) of the total 2,407 companies got funded. Of these, 149 were in
Bangalore and 117 in NCR — about 58%. About 66% of the companies obtained
funding within three years. Interestingly, a sixth got funding in the year of
inception.
Sectorial Focus
Online
services remain the biggest focus area for these start-ups, mirroring what is
happening globally.
Start-Ups
And Their Founders:
Experienced
vs Freshers: Of the start-ups founded in 2009-12, more than 55% of the founders
had less than 10 years of experience. The start-up itch is higher among
executives with under 15 years of experience.
Start-up
Hubs
VC
Funding: US attract about 70% of global VC investment. Canada, Europe and
Israel are stagnating or contracting while India shows modest growth, and China
is close to emerging as the No. 2 global hub.
